Is Anthropic Coming For eBay?
Late Friday afternoon, as most people were checking out for the weekend after nearly two months of U.S.-Iran war fatigue, Anthropic quietly released a note titled "Project Deal." The company built a closed marketplace where AI agents negotiated prices, struck deals, and completed real transactions with money changing hands.
"We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues' behalf," Anthropic wrote on X.
New Anthropic research: Project Deal.
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) April 24, 2026
We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues’ behalf. pic.twitter.com/H2f6cLDlAW
The results: Claude agents made 186 deals across more than 500 listed items on a Slack-based marketplace, totaling just over $4,000 in transaction value.
But the quality of the model mattered a lot. In the simulated runs where Opus and Haiku models negotiated with one-another, the Opus models got substantially better deals.
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) April 24, 2026
Interestingly, though, participants in our survey didn’t pick up on this disparity. pic.twitter.com/X26hhIieJN
Anthropic's point is that AI-to-AI commerce offers an early look at the coming agentic economy, where AI bots negotiate with other bots in a marketplace to strike the best deal.
Claude interviewed 69 of our colleagues about what they wanted to buy and sell. Each Claude asked for any custom instructions, then went off to haggle.
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) April 24, 2026
We ran 4 markets in parallel, to find out what would happen if we varied the models doing the negotiating. pic.twitter.com/FJdD6S2TSd
AI disruption has already hammered software stocks. Now, as Polymarket Money pointed out, "eBay's leadership team is seeing this," referring to Project Deal.
eBay's leadership team seeing this: pic.twitter.com/Hg0KMdhC5z
— Polymarket Money (@PolymarketMoney) April 24, 2026
Shortly after Project Deal's release, eBay shares fell about 4.5% by Friday's close in New York.
Does this mean Anthropic is now coming for eBay?